]]>There was a major shakeup in the world of container-based computing this week when operating system provider CoreOS decided to get into the container space with a new open source project called Rocket. It’s a container runtime environment as well as a set of specifications for how App Containers — what CoreOS calls its container images — are built and function. But the bigger news industry-wide was the suggestion from CoreOS that it built Rocket because developer darling Docker isn’t living up to expectations.

CoreOS Co-founder and CEO Alex Polvi came on the Structure Show podcast this week to clarify that message and to explain the rationale behind Rocket and everything CoreOS does. If you’re interested in the future of containers, distributed systems and even cloud computing, both business-wise and technologically, it’s a must-listen interview. Here are some highlights, but there’s a lot more good stuff.

We’re fine with Docker, really!

If there’s one point that Polvi really wants to get across, it’s that CoreOS didn’t build Rocket because it doesn’t like Docker — either the technology or the company. He called that notion — expressed by the media, as well as, in numerous fora, Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes — “fundamentally flawed.”

The rationale behind Rocket is simple, Polvi explained. Docker is turning into more of a platform, adding in features around cluster management, networking and booting cloud servers, and CoreOS wanted to make sure that the original, simple container component didn’t get lost to the world as that happens. In fact, he says he’s fine with the idea of a Docker platform:

“That’s a fine product, the private cloud is an open territory right now still. So the Docker platform is a product that needs to exist. We just want the simple composable building block to also exist for people that have their own platforms or they’re trying to build their own platform to use as a reusable component.”

Although, below the surface, it might not be the mutual respect society the companies would like everyone to think it is. Later, while comparing Docker’s move away from containers to VMware’s move away from virtual machines, Polvi noted, “There is a debate as to whether the technology warrants another company like VMware to emerge.”

CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi

We build what we have to

When you consider the CoreOS business strategy, the reasons for Rocket begin to look a little more clear. Polvi calls the CoreOS lineup of technologies, which also includes a database, registry service, cluster management and other pieces, “a platform for platform builders.” It’s building the “primitives” that people need to build next-generation distributed systems and platforms, as opposed to actually building the platforms (think Heroku or CoreOS partner Deis) where people ultimately deploy applications.

“We are never trying to just take somebody else’s solution and build it,” Polvi said. “We’re trying to fill in the white space and build something that’s technically sound in an area we think is an open problem.”

He contrasts this with Docker, which he says is now becoming more akin to cluster (and container) management plays such as Mesosphere and the Kubernetes project, or VMware. Those technologies might use containers and let users move them around and manage them, but they’re far more about the management aspect than about the containers, or any other pieces of infrastructure, themselves.

Kubernetes works levels above the container, which isn’t mentioned on this diagram from Microsoft.

In fact, despite the fact that CoreOS has its own cluster-management tool, called Fleet, Polvi said the company actually contributes quite a bit to the Google-led Kubernetes project because it really likes the technology and the trajectory the project is on.

“Docker was a similar thing early on,” he added. “We used it for a year, we collaborated heavily with that community, but then it became clear they were on a trajectory that was no longer what we needed — and what a lot of people needed, not just us.”

A quick thought on the cloud

We also asked Polvi about the world of cloud computing, where he used to work after Rackspace acquired his last startup, CloudKick, and where many CoreOS workloads will likely run. Maybe old allegiances just die hard, but Polvi thinks Rackspace is actually in a pretty good position as bigger cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft continue to drive down prices.

“Now, because of the competitive pressure of the cloud providers, compute on infrastructure will go asymptotically to free over time, as well,” he said. “If you think about it, what’s left after the hard parts of software are free and the compute itself is relatively free, or free enough? … I think it’s service, that’s how you do it. You help people use all this stuff.”

]]>Docker is having one of its most interesting weeks of the year starting Monday as partner (and now potential rival) CoreOS revealed its new container technology of mass-destruction, Rocket — a possible alternative to Docker. The timing of Rocket’s launch was suspect, considering this week Docker is holding a conference in Amsterdam, but the container specialist isn’t putting its head in the sand. Instead, Docker is announcing on Thursday several new features to woo developers who want to more easily craft container-based applications on the Docker platform.

Docker will detail its long-awaited open-source container-orchestration services, as well as Docker Hub Enterprise, a version of the Docker Hub for paid clients. The three orchestration tools are now available in an alpha release and should enter general availability in the second quarter of 2015. Docker Hub Enterprise will be available in early access in February 2015.

The startup noted before that these new services have been in the pipeline for some time as it attempts to make its platform a sort of container-based-application-development-hub for coders to craft multicomponent applications across different cloud providers. To do this, Docker built orchestration tools, which coordinate, schedule and distribute the appropriate system resources necessary for an application to be built and run in an automated fashion.

How to orchestrate your containers

The three new orchestration services include Docker Machine, Docker Swam and Docker Compose.

Docker Machine is essentially a simpler way for developers to get the Docker engine up and running on multiple clouds from the comfort of their own laptops without having to do any manual configuration, explained David Messina, Docker’s vice president of enterprise marketing. The service uses an API that connects to any cloud so “the infrastructure itself is instantly Docker ready,” he said.

Similar to Docker Machine, Docker Compose basically makes it easier for developers to build an application using multiple Docker containers, regardless of the infrastructure used; a configuration file lets coders craft an application using multiple containers in minutes.

Docker Swarm is a clustering service that ensures an application’s distributed containers are automatically “getting fed the right resources,” said Messina. Docker is also partnering with resource-management startup Mesosphere so that Mesosphere’s technology can be baked into Swarm, he said.

Swarm will eventually have a set of clustering APIs that allow it to connect with other clustering services so a developer could use Swarm to manage a set of containers on a test environment and then eventually transfer those containers to another clustering system like Mesos or the Amazon EC2 Container service.

And on to the enterprise

As for Docker Enterprise, the new service is pretty much the same Docker that everyone knows except tailored for enterprises who want to use it behind a company firewall for added security. Companies should also have access to both private and public Docker repositories.

It was possible to use Docker behind a firewall before, but companies needed open-source software and tools to do so; like Docker Machine and Compose, this service makes a complex task a bit more simple.

Although pricing has not been determined, the new Enterprise Hub will be available through Docker partners Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and IBM on their own clouds. As part of the launch of the Enterprise Hub, Docker is also announcing its new partnership with IBM, making yet another big tech partner.

IBM will let customers use Docker Enterprise on-premise or in the cloud and Microsoft will let organizations sign up on the Azure marketplace. Amazon is making Docker Enterprise available on its AWS Test Drives and AWS Quick Start Reference platforms, which are essentially the Amazon-sanctioned services for people to test out non-Amazon-related IT products on Amazon infrastructure.

It’s not clear yet if Google will eventually offer Docker Enterprise on its own cloud. Google detailed in November its own paid-container-management platform called Google Container Engine, based on its open-sourced Kubernetes system. It will be worth watching how Amazon plans to tout Docker Enterprise as well, since it recently showed off its own EC2 Container Service.

Lots of new features, but are they warranted?

From these announcements, it’s clear Docker is trying to expand from simply being a container-centric startup to being an application-development service that rolls with all the cloud providers.

Of course, given CoreOS’s claims this week that by working on all the extra bells and whistles, Docker has lost sight of creating a “standard container,” it’s hard not to think that perhaps Docker is getting a bit caught up in its own momentum and its urge to become a modern-day application-development hub.

Messina disagreed with Polvi’s statements on Docker, and said “the drive for orchestration is driven by the need of the users in our community.” Supposedly, Docker’s large community has called on Docker to upgrade those containers and make sure they can be spun up and controlled across multiple clouds with ease.

Messina didn’t want to go in detail as to what he felt Polvi got wrong about Docker when CoreOS unveiled its own stripped-down App Containers, but he did say that Polvi was “painfully inaccurate” when he referred to Docker being “fundamentally flawed” as it pertains to security.

“There’s an incredible number of inaccuracies in that blog post,” Messina said. “I don’t want to comment one by one.”

Docker is only roughly 20 months old, said Messina, and like other technologies, the 1.0 version of a product evolves over time into something a bit different than what started out based on community feedback.

“What is there today will not necessarily be there tomorrow or next week,” he said.

Messina stressed that “Each one of these services is available on the platform but optional.” However, as container-clustering startup Giant Swarm’s founder Oliver Thylmann told me earlier this week, he and his team have noticed the Docker daemon growing each day as Docker adds more features.

Still, it’s understandable why Docker is launching these services. The promise of containers was that it could make developing applications a whole lot easier and prevent infrastructure lockdown. The gist of the new orchestration services is that Docker’s containers are more portable than ever and can run better on different clouds; whether that adds to a larger Docker daemon or ironically ends up making Docker more complex than what it needs to be remains to be seen.

As for Docker Enterprise, the startup has been saying it wants to take a Red Hat approach to its open-source technology, and today’s announcements lays the groundwork for more Docker enterprise services to sprout. The important detail was for Docker to convince enterprises that it’s safe to use, and by making a version of Docker that can run behind a company firewall as well as containing private repositories, companies could feel better about giving the new service a whirl.

The outlier in this case are the multiple cloud providers that are Docker partners. Just how long will they tolerate a startup that plays nice with their competitors and allows for customers to use other infrastructure as well? There is a cloud war going on, after all.

]]>SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is now equipped with landing legs, which could eventually allow it to be reusable–a crucial step toward lowering the cost of carrying cargo to space. The space startup released a video today taken from the surface of the rocket as it passed through the planet’s atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. “The water impact caused loss of hull integrity, but we received all the necessary data to achieve a successful landing on a future flight,” a blog post states. “At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment.”

The satellite, owned by SES, will provide telecommunications services to South Asia and the Asia Pacific region. This is the first time SpaceX has taken on a task of this kind and is its most difficult mission to date.

SpaceX aborted the first two mission launches last week after experiencing problems with the rocket’s oxygen systems. It released the following statements:

November 25:

We observed unexpected readings with the first stage liquid oxygen system so we decided to investigate. The launch vehicle and satellite are in great shape and we are looking forward to the next launch opportunity on Thursday at 5:38 p.m. Eastern time.

November 28:

Thursday’s abort was caused by oxygen in the ground side igniter fluid (TEA-TEB). Rocket engines are healthy, but cleaning turbopump gas generators will take another day. Earliest possible launch attempt is Monday evening.

The Falcon 9 first launched in 2010. Since then, it became the first private craft to visit the International Space Station. It has more than 50 planned government and private missions to complete.

SpaceX, which is led by former PayPal head and Tesla founder Elon Musk, is currently developing its reusable Grasshopper rocket, which can land back on the ground after launch. On top of the Falcon 9, it currently offers the services of its Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4&w=560&h=315]

This post was updated at 3:30 p.m. PT to reflect that the satellite was successfully delivered to orbit.

The first four satellites of O3b’s broadband constellation are ready to make their journey into medium-Earth orbit (MEO), where they will project spot beams down to some of the planet’s most poorly connected countries: from Rwanda to tiny Pacific islands. The project certainly isn’t Google’s alone. The search giant is part of a long list of investors and banks that forked over $1.18 billion to fund the startup. The others include satellite giant SES, cable operator Liberty Global, investment bank Allen & Company, North Bridge Venture Partners, Satya Capital, and the Development Bank of South Africa.

But Google invested in the O3b Networks right as it was getting started in 2008, showing that its interest in finding alternative forms of broadband isn’t a new thing. You’ve heard lately a lot of references to Google connecting the billions of “others” who don’t enjoy internet privileges. Well, if you hadn’t already guessed, O3b stands for “Other 3 billion.”

O3b is splitting the difference. It’s building a constellation of eight satellites (which it will gradually expand to 12 and then 16) in medium-Earth orbit, about 5,000 miles up and four times closer to its intended customers than a geosynchronous satellite. The higher vantage point means O3b birds can cover more ground than their LEO cousins, but they support much lower latencies (180 milliseconds from mouth to ear) then the big communications orbiters far above them.

Each O3b orbiter will support a total of 12 Gbps of capacity, which it will divide between ten 1.2 Gbps spot beams pointed at the ground. That may seem paltry compared to the 140 Gbps of capacity supported by Viasat’s new super-satellite, but where ViaSat has one bird, O3b will have eight, and as demand increases it can field more of them (it’s already building its next four).

Because these satellites aren’t in geosynchronous orbit they’ll be constantly passing overhead — when a satellite sinks below the horizon, another replaces it. They all travel the equator, meaning they can’t beam down to the upper and lower latitudes of the globe, but 70 percent of the world’s population lives within its geographic band, including most of the people with no access to the internet.

O3b doesn’t plan on selling broadband directly to consumers. Instead it wants to be a backbone provider, providing the equivalent of a fiber link where no fiber exists. That means supplying backhaul to cell towers and IP trunking to remote ISPs.

The launch of the first four O3b satellites was scheduled for Monday, but weather conditions forced a delay. The new launch has been reset for Tuesday, but blasting satellites into orbit is always a tricky business — the launch could be pushed back further or rescheduled entirely before the week is out. O3b plans to send the second batch of four satellites up in September.

A network with limits

O3b’s network may be powerful, but in the grand scheme of things 12 Gbps isn’t that much (even when you multiply it by 8 or 12) when you’re talking about covering the majority of the globe. We’re not too far from the point where a single three-sector LTE site could support 1 Gbps of total capacity. O3b may be able to provide baseline voice and data connectivity to people who’ve been denied internet access. But it’s not going to supply the level of mobile broadband – and certainly not wireline broadband – we’re becoming accustomed to in the developed world.

O3b may not be able to deliver broadband to the world, but it could make it possible to bring cell towers and rural ISPs online in remote areas of the world that have never had access to such infrastructure. That’s a great starting point, and eventually other technologies can help fill in the broadband gaps.

]]>Four years of meticulous planning, and it all came down to one moment: the lighting of a gigantic fuse.

On June 4, 2010, Matt Desch, CEO of satellite communications company Iridium, sat in his McLean, Va., office staring into a computer screen at a live video feed of a 368-ton rocket idling on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The telecom veteran had staked Iridium’s future on a $3 billion plan to bring the company’s aging constellation of satellites into the 21st century. A key part of that plan was getting 72 next-generation satellites into orbit, and it was this rocket, now preparing for its maiden flight, that would eventually carry Iridium’s precious cargo into space.

In selecting a company to launch his satellites, Desch hadn’t opted for a tried-and-true aerospace player like Arianespace or International Launch Services. Instead, he had decided to go with the upstart Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX. Why? SpaceX had offered to launch the six-dozen satellites for half what the established players were charging, saving Iridium half-a-billion dollars.

Matt Desch

But the decision carried a huge amount of risk. While SpaceX’s entrepreneur-founder Elon Musk was already well known for his ambitious goal of privatizing space travel, his company at the time had had more failures than successes. Its previous-model rocket, the Falcon 1,misfired on each of its first three launches: the first caught fire, the engine on the second died, and on its third launch, the rocket’s two stages collided. Those failures sent the company teetering toward toward death, saved only by the Falcon 1’s fourth, successful, launch.

Now, Desch and Iridium were about to see whether SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon 9, was more reliable than its predecessor — and the months leading up to June 4 hadn’t been very reassuring. The rocket was supposed to have embarked on its first flight in November of the previous year, but that launch had been postponed 10 separate times.

The rocket had finally reached the pad, but as Desch watched from his office, there had already been one false start, the launch aborted due to an errant sensor reading. If SpaceX couldn’t light the fuse by 3 PM, the mission would have to be rescheduled once again.

Another string of failures could endanger Iridium’s exacting launch schedule, or worse, send SpaceX spiraling into bankruptcy and Iridium scrambling to find another launch provider. The biggest concern, though, was the reaction of Iridiums’s bankers. Desch had negotiated a $492 millon contract with SpaceX — the largest commercial launch contract in history – but because of SpaceX’s track record, the consortium of European banks underwriting the whole project wanted to see a successful launch of the Falcon 9 before they put pen to paper.

As Desch put it: “Bankers don’t like to see explosions.”

Fifteen minutes before the launch window closed, the Falcon 9’s first-stage engines ignited and the rocket lifted off. Six minutes later it achieved its target altitude and placed a dummy capsule in orbit 155 miles above the Earth. The normally stoic Desch let out a cheer of elation. Outside his office his employees celebrated — high fives all around.

A week later, Desch was in Paris hamming it up with the bankers, and true to their word, the financiers signed off on the contract. When Musk attended Iridium’s investor conference in New Orleans later that year he was treated like a superhero — it was like “having Tony Stark, a real-life Iron Man” in the room, Desch said.

Elon Musk

The following is the never-before-told story of how Iridium placed a huge bet on SpaceX that wound up paying off. In a series of interviews, Desch shared with GigaOM the details about how a satellite communications company struggling with its future found common cause with a scrappy startup that wanted to broaden the frontiers of space exploration.

Iridium didn’t need SpaceX to survive, but by placing its faith its Elon Musk’s company it found a way to overhaul one of the largest satellite constellations in the heavens on a shoestring budget — and trade up its old voice-centric business model for one focused on data. In exchange, SpaceX got the major contract it needed to firmly establish itself as a powerhouse in commercial space flight.

A mobile network hurtling through space at 17,000 mph

Iridium was born out of the satellite communications boom of the late 1990s, riding a wave of speculation that satellite players like itself, Globalstar and Orbcomm could build a truly global mobile network for the monied classes. Backed heavily by Motorola, it activated its constellation in November 1999 and began selling its first bulky satellite phones around the world. Nine months later it filed for bankruptcy,

At that point it was clear that satellite telephony wasn’t going to even compete with cellular, much less replace it. There was a good chance that Iridium’s $5 billion to $6 billion network would have been decommissioned entirely, letting the satellites fall out of orbit and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating one of the most spectacular pyrotechnics display the world has every seen. But at the last minute, a consortium of investors bought Iridium’s extraterrestrial assets for pennies on the dollar and restarted satellite phone service in 2001 with much more modest ambitions.

Iridium isn’t your typical satellite communications company. It’s not tossing a few satellites into orbit that are hovering at fixed points above specific continents. Instead, it operates a constellation of 66 birds that cover the entirety of the Earth’s surface from pole to pole. Each satellite travels at an orbital velocity of 17,000 mph on dispersed planes that intersect on the Earth’s axis, meaning no matter where you’re standing – or floating — on the surface of the earth, you’re in view of multiple Iridium satellites.

That kind of network may not be useful to your typical consumer or business user, but it’s extremely attractive to a certain set of professionals – military, international contractors, merchant marines, field scientists and surveyors – that travel to the far corners of the globe.

When Desch took over as CEO in 2006, Iridium had cemented a close relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense, and was expanding into the private sector. He took the company public, made it a profitable venture, and expanded the company’s portfolio to include data and machine-to-machine services communications (for companies or organizations that want to keep track of their assets even when they are in the middle of the ocean or in the remotest jungle). Desch has doubled Iridium’s subscribers to 576,000 in six years, according to the company’s last earnings report.

Desch said Iridium no longer has any interest in challenging the mobile carrier powers or moving beyond basic voice and data connectivity. “I hate to use the term dumb pipe,” he said. “It has such negative connotations. But I have no problem with the term because no one can supply the kind of dumb pipe we can.”

A fascination with anything that flies

Desch started his career at Bell Labs 30 years ago, and since then he’s made the rounds through the telecom industry. He was president of the now defunct Nortel Networks’ wireless division, where he oversaw the construction of some of the world’s biggest 2G networks. In 2002, he was tapped to become CEO of Telcordia, the former research arm of the regional Bell phone companies. He sits on President Obama’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and has either chaired or sat on the boards of pretty much every U.S. telecom industry trade and standards organization.

An Iridium Flare over upstate New York

Desch grew up during the Apollo Moon flights, and has always been fascinated by anything that flies. Though he’s never left the troposphere, he pilots his single-engine Cessna T210 several times a month. When discussing Iridium, Desch never fails to mention that the satellite constellation has become an object of obsession among star gazers. All of Iridium’s satellites have flat, door-sized, highly-reflective antennas. When those antennas catch the sun’s rays just right they produce a “flare” 3o times brighter than Venus in the night sky.

When Desch accepted his new role at Iridium, he was almost immediately handed a huge task: to replace Iridium’s aging constellation with a new generations of satellites. It’s current network is already well past its anticipated operational lifespan of seven to 10 years, and several satellites have already malfunctioned or have tumbled back into the atmosphere. Iridium 33 was decommissioned in a more dramatic fashion in 2009 when it collided over Siberia with a defunct Russian communications satellite at 22,000 mph.

Iridium replaced those defunct or lost satellites with in-orbit spares, and Desch said that the company could keep the current fleet going until 2017 when it hopes to complete its replacement. But there is definitely a sense of urgency. Iridium may be able to squeeze some more operational life out of its satellites, but it doesn’t change the fact they’re already obsolete.

In the last 10 years, mobile communications has shifted its focus from voice to mobile broadband. Satellite broadband technology has made huge leaps. ViaSat in October put into orbit a satellite with a total network capacity of 140 Gbps, allowing it to offer speeds up to 12 Mbps to customers on the ground. Iridium’s closest competitor Globalstar, which runs a constellation of 40 satellites, is already one-third of the way through its next-generation satellite deployment. Globalstar’s orbiters only support speeds of 256 kbps, but even those sub-broadband connections put Iridium at a significant disadvantage.

Iridium’s network can only support a 10 kbps earth-to-orbit connection, which is pretty much the speed of a 1990 dial-up modem. That might be fine for downloading email without attachments from an ocean-bound oil tanker or sending out the GPS coordinates of a polar expedition. But in an age of multi-megabit connections to smartphones, those speeds just don’t cut it.

Desch’s big bet

Between 2015 and 2017, Iridium plans to replace every single one of its 66 current satellites with new Thales Alenia-built orbiters, and also throw up six spares. Called Iridium Next, the constellation will boast device connection of speeds of well over 1 Mbps to mobile devices and 8 Mbps to dish antennas, and will significantly boost the capacity of the overall satellite grid. When the constellation is complete, Desch said, Iridium will be the only communications company in the world that can deliver a megabit or more of a bandwidth to any point on the globe.

To get such a huge payload into low-Earth orbit, Desch didn’t just need a launch provider to supply multiple rockets, he needed one that could reliably send those rockets into space every few months starting in 2015. Once Iridium puts its first batch of satellites into orbit, the others need to go up in rapid succession.

Iridium’s satellites aren’t just bouncing signals back down to the Earth’s surface. They’re inter-networked. They’re passing calls among one another in a cosmic game of hot potato until one of those satellites flies over one of four ground stations where it finally connects the call to the terrestrial network.

Having a 1 Mbps connection to a new satellite does little good if the satellite completing the chain can only support dial-up speeds. So Iridium Next won’t be open for business until the full complement of 66 new satellites is in orbit.

Finally, Iridium had to buy those launches on the cheap, according to mobile satellite services analyst Tim Farrar. The original Iridium constellation in 1999 was a multi-billion-dollar debacle. So Iridium is determined to get its next-generation network up on a $3 billion budget, Farrar said.

“Iridium really had to go with SpaceX, because more established players have found their launch services in heavy demand in recent years and so have been raising prices,” Farrar said.

For $492 million, SpaceX would deliver eight launches, while any other rocket supplier would have charged $1 billion for the same services, Desch said. But Iridium also hedged its bets. It contracted with ISC Kosmotras — a launch consortium between Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan — to serve as a second launch provider and as a backup in case SpaceX is delayed.

Still, it wasn’t an easy decision, Desch said. Iridium first started negotiating with SpaceX in 2006, when its rockets started falling out of the sky. It wouldn’t matter how much of a deal SpaceX cut if it couldn’t deliver a reliable launch vehicle or ceased operations.

“Our view was always that SpaceX was going to be successful,” Desch said. “What we weren’t sure about was when they would be successful.” Iridium had some leeway since its first launch wasn’t scheduled until 2015, but it couldn’t push its launch date out much further. At that point Iridium’s old orbiters would be 15 years old, long past their original expiration dates. It needed to get the new birds up but before the old ones start failing en masse.

Iridium is by no means Space X’s most important customer — that would be NASA. Nor is Iridium SpaceX’s first commercial satellite customer. But the size and scope of the Iridium deal were key to establishing the fledgling aerospace company as a heavyweight in the commercial launch industry, said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who led negotiations with the satellite operator.

Gwynne Shotwell

“We definitely knew the significance of that deal,” Shotwell said. “It was the largest commercial launch contract at the time. No one else has ordered six or seven launches. … It’s helped us out in every deal we’ve gotten since.”

Houston, do we have a problem?

Earlier this month, Iridium revealed in its second-quarter earnings call that it was canceling its first Falcon 9 launch, and had decided to go with backup ICS Kosmotras for its first flight. Desch said there were no problems or delays; rather Iridium was just minimizing costs. By packing 10, rather than nine, satellites onto each SpaceX rocket, Iridium says it can reduce the number of launches from eight to seven, saving an estimated $15 million. But Desch added that Iridium also wanted to buy SpaceX more time.

“It’s a smarter strategy for in-orbit testing and provides us some additional cost savings,” Desch said. “It also gives SpaceX a little more time to get through the two dozen or so launches that are on their manifest before Iridium Next.”

Ironically, the greatest risk to Iridium now isn’t the possibility of SpaceX’s failure, but the possibility that SpaceX becomes too successful, according to satellite communications analyst Farrar.

“Their risk has always been that SpaceX gets a lot of money from NASA and so will likely put them first,” Farrar said. “That’s also the exciting, novel stuff like manned spaceflight, so people naturally gravitate towards it. Launching commercial satellites is a less exciting business requiring a lot of repetitive, careful engineering.”

When asked if SpaceX’s recent success jeopardized Iridium’s tight launch schedule, Desch laughed. He admitted that he freaks out a little when Musk goes off on one of his soliloquies about exploring other planets or talks up new rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy designed to propel astronauts on their extraplanetary adventures. Desch just needs to get to low-Earth orbit, not Mars.

But Desch said Iridium has SpaceX’s full attention. Iridium Next is still SpaceX’s single largest commercial contract — it’s not going to get pushed to the wayside no matter how many sexier missions the company lands. Desch has been working with Musk and Shotwell for nearly six years, sticking with the company through its lowest points. He believes that SpaceX will remember its early friends. As he told analysts at Iridium’s earning call: “We knew them when they weren’t quite as cool.”

]]>When you’re a big operation like Rocket Internet, you try a lot of things at once and see what sticks. And while attempts such as Pinspire have the whiff of failure about them, other Rocket firms such as Munich-based Westwing are doing very well indeed.

The site is one of those flash-sale shopping clubs that were rare a year ago, but took off after Fab.com pivoted midway through 2011. Concentrating on the ‘home and living’ segment, Westwing was only founded in August last year, but it already boasts three million members in more than a dozen countries (including several where it trades as Dalani).

Sales have increased tenfold in the last five months, the company claims. That’s an impressive performance, and it’s now got some serious validation: with $32m of funding already in the bank, Westwing has announced that it’s picked up a further $50m, with existing investors such as Rocket, Access Industries, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Investment AB Kinnevik being joined by round-leader Summit Partners.

Summit knows this segment well, having been an investor in Vente Privée, the French company that kicked off the whole flash-sale shopping club thing before anyone else realized it was a good idea.

And with this extra cash, Westwing looks set to do what Rocket firms do best — expand like crazy.

“We are dedicated to building one of the largest e-commerce retailers in the emerging home décor and furnishing market on an international scale,” Westwing CEO Stefan Smalla said. “With this new capital, we will accelerate our rapid growth, scale operations in each of our countries.”

As we’ve pointed out before, the genius of Rocket’s approach is in creating an international distribution network that can support any number of new e-commerce models that are plonked on top of it — so now that Rocket is up and running in Brazil, for example, it can roll out new ideas in that country very quickly.

But making those new models attractive and ‘sticky’ is another matter. Zappos clones like Zalando are relatively easy to make work, being more about margins and distribution than anything else, but flash-sale outfits like Westwing need to have a certain class and character that makes them stand out.

Which is no doubt why Smalla noted that Westwing would “benefit from [Summit’s] substantial experience” – a prime example, if ever there was one, of investors bringing a lot more than money to the table.

The Wrapp-DropGifts battle is now starting to resemble a high-speed (for the e-commerce world) game of Risk. Wrapp only launched in Sweden last November, and in the intervening months it claims to have had 150,000 users sending more than a million gift vouchers to their Facebook friends, using the iPhone and Android Wrapp apps, in that country alone.

Since DropGifts appeared in late February, Wrapp has opened in Norway, Finland, the UK and now Germany, and is still aiming to move into the USA, China, Japan and Brazil as well as Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Eastern Europe.

It would do well to move fast. DropGifts has already opened shop in Italy, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, France and Brazil, and is soon to arrive in India, South Africa and who knows where else.

And DropGifts has also just received a chunk of investment from eVenture Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Deutsche Startups reported on Sunday.

Of course, the battle is not just about who can open in the most places most quickly — although that’s a pretty big deal. Wrapp’s major selling point, it says, is that unlike Rocket it doesn’t operate a bunch of e-commerce businesses itself, so it makes for a more trustworthy partner for the brands whose vouchers it’s selling.

Rocket’s game is quantity first, quality later. Over time, we’ll get to see who wins on quality. But right now, it looks like it’s all about who can spread faster.

]]>A year ago, the peer to peer travel site Wimdu — a European version of Airbnb — didn’t even exist. Now the company’s CEO, Arne Bleckwenn, is presiding over a business that’s expanding rapidly and getting serious traction: one of the first things he proudly points out to me is that revenues have nearly quadrupled in the past three months, and there are now well in excess of 50,000 properties on the site, spread across dozens of countries.

The two seem destined for a headlong crash into each other, but Bleckwenn is quick to suggest that the market is big enough to support them both.

“I think there will be a couple of really big companies, and then a number of smaller ones too,” he says. “To me, the reality is that we’re both taking business away from the hotel industry.”

On the surface at least, the rangy German — a serial entrepreneur with a handful of previous web businesses behind him — is targeting the big hotel chains, with the hospitality industry heading towards half a trillion dollars. They are concerned about Wimdu and others, he says, because peer-to-peer accommodation not only cuts hotels out of the loop but it also offers people something that they can’t: the chance to feel like a local.

Another reason to focus on growth rather than competition, he suggests, is that while Wimdu thinks it is going mainstream, it’s still some distance away from being a household name yet.

“The fact is that if you ask people on the street what is Airbnb or what is Wimdu, most of them won’t know,” he admits.

Still, the company feels like it’s turned a corner. Since the start of the year things have cranked up, with visits growing dramatically and revenues now in “seven figures”.

So what accounts for the massive surge in growth over the past few months? It’s not really seasonal — unlike more traditional travel businesses — because the average Wimdu user largely books weekend city breaks at short notice rather than long-term holidays. Instead, he suggests, it’s largely down to smart marketing, he says: nothing revolutionary, but well-focused and well-funded.

Funding, of course, is not something Bleckwenn has to worry much about. The company raised a bumper $90 million last summer from Swedish investment Kinnevik and incubator Rocket Internet — the infamous German clone factory, which we have covered in plenty of detail here in the past. That money is what has helped Wimdu get the wheels spinning so fast, so soon, but it also comes with serious strings attached (Rocket companies are notorious for giving founders only a limited amount of equity, and pushing workers very, very hard.)

These days, says Bleckwenn, Rocket has less input in the way the company is run. They’re starting to develop their own identity, separate from the mothership, and exploring what they can do outside of the day-to-day business of getting up and running.

“They [Rocket] are really focused on short-term; getting the company started, building fast, executing quickly,” he says. “They have a lot of expertise in marketing and sales that has been useful. But bow we’re successful they do not get involved very much, and we are able to think more long-term and build our own company culture which is very different from Rocket’s.”

Still, he thinks the fact that Rocket focuses on building companies in Europe gives Wimdu other advantages, not just aggressive DNA and a different market to target from its American cousins. At the very least, the company has a deeper understanding of what it takes to launch in new countries, since the European market is so complex.

It’s an approach that has helped Wimdu spread into more than 100 countries, and led it to enter the Chinese market in a slightly different way, through a spin-off business called Airizu. This is something that European businesses should be using to their advantage more, he suggests.

“It’s not just about translating your website,” he says, shaking his head. “For example, when we looked at launching in Switzerland, there people there were immediately asking about insurance coverage. That’s something that Americans don’t tend to ask. You have to treat different countries, different cultures, in different ways.”

]]>It’s become almost cliche to say that the Samwer brothers, Europe’s most successful — and notorious — internet entrepreneurs are publicity shy. A series of exits to the likes of eBay and Groupon have made them millions, but they have tended to keep away from the press, avoid much in the way of public speaking, and even apparently walk out of interviews from time to time. Why? Presumably it is in part because the awkward questions about their copycat ideas just keep on coming.

But is it now time to retire the idea that they just won’t talk?

Two major pieces in the last few days suggest that the three brothers — Marc, Oliver and Alexander — have decided to go on something of a press offensive.

“There are pioneering entrepreneurs and execution entrepreneurs, and maybe we belong more to the execution entrepreneurs,” says Oliver, who speaks at a rapid clip, frequently punctuating thoughts with a rhetorical “ja?”

“I think the most admirable entrepreneurs are those with original ideas, ja? It’s a unique gift that you either have or you don’t. Just as we might have a very good gift of execution, others have a unique gift for the purest form of innovation.”

Meanwhile, a piece in the new edition of Wired UK, called Inside The Clone Factory, treads similar ground with a little more flourish. Written by Reuters journalist Matt Cowan, it’s obviously been several months in the making (it opens with an interview in Munich last September) and also tries to get to the bottom of what keeps them going.

“If I was motivated by money alone, I would have stopped a long time ago,” he [Oliver] insists. Rather, he suggests that what galvanises them is winning: “To prove over and over again that we’re the best,” he explains.

Both stories are good reads that give some insight into the brothers and into Rocket, and more or less go over the same ideas.

Both stories get to visit the offices of Rocket and discuss the company’s position in the fast-growing Berlin startup scene. And, ultimately, both stories manage to get the brothers (actually, mainly Oliver) to go on the record, even if it’s largely to share the same anecdotes or make the same points.

How much they add to your understanding of the Samwer brothers probably depends on how closely you follow Rocket’s movements.

The meta question is not about what these articles themselves say, or even what the Samwers say about themselves. It’s why they are appearing now. What do they hope to get from these interviews? Is it understanding? Legitimacy? Better press in general?

Whatever the case, the trio are obviously taking on a slightly new approach — and this feels like a watershed of sorts. After all, even though they really end up saying very little, well… at least they’re talking.